The present invention relates generally to monitoring machines and more particularly to using a dynamic signal processing configuration to monitor measurements associated with the management of a machine and measurements associated with the safety protection.
In the field of industrial equipment monitoring and control, monitored machine components may generate various signals representative of dynamic machine conditions. Signal-generating components such as sensors and transducers are typically positioned on or otherwise closely associated with points of interest of the machine. A portion of these signals and a subset of data analysis that is performed on these signals are used to determine safety critical machine performance. Actions taken on this data may include machine shut-down or a change in operating conditions of the machine that are necessary to prevent catastrophic loss of life, environmental damage, or financial loss. Another portion of these signals and subset of data analysis are used to manage the use of the machine. For example, this information may be used to schedule machine repair outages or to alter machine operating conditions to maximize performance, efficiency, or machine life.
Typically, a variety of machine conditions arise in a machine that necessitates the alteration of data that is used to manage the use of the machine. Alterations may include changing the sample rates and filtering to add or remove frequency content, changing the frequency that data samples are collected, or changing whether the data is integrated or not. An alteration could also arise if an operator of the machine needs to add a measurement or dynamic waveform display to further analyze the health of the machine.
In contrast to data used to manage the operation of a machine, data associated with the safety protection of the machine are typically based on machine physical parameters such as bearing clearances, and are changed infrequently. In addition, because of the safety criticality of these protection measurements, availability and reliability are of utmost importance. Also, the control over these different data sets may reside with different individuals within the plant. For example, measurements associated with the safety protection of the machine may be the responsibility of the plant operations, whereas the data associated with the management of the use of the machine may be the responsibility of the plant reliability group. Generally, the operations group needs confidence that the reliability group cannot impact production and the reliability group needs confidence that their actions will not impact production.
Because of these differences between measurements associated with the safety protection of the machine and measurements associated with the management of the use of the machine, it is desirable to separate the signal processing functions of these measurements. Unfortunately, none of the existing approaches are optimal. For example, one approach is to provide separate signal processing hardware devices with one hardware device assigned to processing data associated with the safety protection measurements and a second hardware device that processes data associated with management of the machine. This approach adds significant complexity and cost as measurements needed for protection and management must be produced in both hardware devices or else communicated between the two devices. In another approach, only a limited amount of management data derived from the protection data is used. For example, if the protection data is generated from a Fast Fourier Transform, then a user of the management data may have access to the complete transform and the raw data feeding into the transform. However, the management data user cannot add more waveforms or significantly alter the data sampling without affecting the protection measurements.